We analyze the implications of axioms formalizing entitlements to continued life for the evaluation of population health, when combined with basic structural axioms. A straightforward implication of our analysis is that if the scope of equal entitlements to continued life is not limited, concerns for morbidity are dismissed in the evaluation of population health. Nevertheless, with axioms formalizing a more limited scope of equal entitlement to continued life, we provide several characterization results of focal population health evaluation functions, ranging from to .

Under normal circumstances, competitive markets do an excellent job of supplying the goods that members of society want and need. But in an emergency like a pandemic, unassisted markets may not suffice. Imagine, for example, that society suddenly needs to obtain tens (or even hundreds) of millions of COVID-19 virus test kits a week. Test kits for this virus are a new product, and so it may not even be clear who the relevant set of manufacturers are. If we had the luxury of time, a laissez-faire market might identify these manufacturers: the price of test kits would adjust until supply matched demand. But getting a new market of this size to equilibrate quickly is unrealistic. Furthermore, markets don't work well when there are concentrations of power on either the buying or selling side, as there might well be here. Finally, a test is, in part, a good (its benefits go not just to the person being tested, but everyone he might come in contact with), and markets do not usually provide public goods adequately. Fortunately, mechanism design can be enlisted to help.

The fear of contracting a serious illness caused by a contagious disease limits economic activity even after reopening. Widespread testing alone will not alleviate this problem. We argue that targeted testing in concert with targeted transfers is essential. We propose a model with these features to determine where agents should be tested and how they should be incentivized. Agents with a low wage, a high risk of infection, and who bear a large cost of falling ill should be tested at work. When testing is very costly, agents with high wages and low expected costs associated with falling ill should be tested at home.

Traditional analysis takes the public or private nature of goods as given. However, technological advances, particularly related to digital goods such as non-fungible tokens, increasingly make rivalry a choice variable of the designer. This paper addresses the question of when a profit-maximizing seller prefers to provide an asset as a private good or as a public good. While the public good is subject to a free-rider problem, a profit-maximizing seller or designer faces a nontrivial quantity-exclusivity tradeoff, and so profits from collecting small payments from multiple agents can exceed the large payment from a single agent. We provide conditions under which the profit from the public good exceeds that from a private good. If the cost of production is sufficiently, but not excessively, large, then production is profitable only for the public good. Moreover, if the lower bound of the support of the buyers' value distribution is positive, then the profit from the public good is unbounded in the number of buyers, whereas the profit from selling the private good is never more than the upper bound of the support minus the cost. As the variance of the agents' distribution becomes smaller, public goods eventually outperform private goods, reflecting intuition based on complete information models, in which public goods always outperform private goods in terms of revenue.

We address the optimal allocation of stochastically dependent resource bundles to a set of simultaneous contests. For this purpose, we study a modification of the Colonel Blotto Game called the Tennis Coach Problem. We devise a thoroughly probabilistic method of payoff representation and fully characterize equilibria in this class of games. We further formalize the idea of strategic team training in a comparative static setting. The problem applies to several distinct economic interactions but seems most prevalent in team sports with individual matches, for instance, in Tennis and Sumo.

I formally establish the existence of a mapping between a class of information design games with multiple senders and a class of all-pay auctions. I fully characterize this mapping and show how to use it to find equilibria in the information design game. The mapping allows for a straightforward comparative statics analysis of equilibria in the latter class of games. I use it to study the effect of the tie-breaking rule on the distributions of posteriors and the receiver's payoff.